Investigating the Investigators

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We all make mistakes. No newsroom is perfect. Journalists are too well aware that we live in glass houses for us to throw stones with abandon or relish. Yet it is becoming hard to shrug off the feeling that to the old proverb that asks, “Who is worse shod than the shoemaker’s wife?” should be added a new trope: who is more mealy-mouthed about investigating failures in its own journalism than the Bureau of Investigative Journalism itself?

The investigation into child abuse in North Wales by Newsnight, which triggered the wrongful naming of Lord McAlpine as a child abuser, was